Have they? I think it's what societies does as a group that shows whether we're "freaking out", and judging by our collective response, it seems like we could not care less...
You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense.
The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe the environmental problems exist.
Sometimes they're even right; just because someone labeling themselves an "environmentalist" claims some environmental problem exists doesn't mean they are correct. These people are probably as dangerous to the environment as the actual polluters. We don't actually have complete and correct information about the effect of things, and if we did, there's a lot of people who wouldn't want to hear it, on both "sides".
But you gotta solve the right problems. Probably a non-trivial component of the environmental movement's semi-effectiveness is how much of the movement wants to fight alongside Captain Planet against essentially non-existent threats, rather than working out how to address the mismatched incentive issue. But I say "semi-effective" because they're far from ineffective, and there are certainly people directly addressing the mismatched incentive issue. For instance, people discussing "carbon taxes" are definitely on a more effective path.
And yet we have idiots in diesel trucks modded to "roll coal" cackling as they "own the libs" when they spew out soot.
He claims that he likes spewing this out onto people he doesn’t like. He’s never mentioned how awesome it is to pollute or anything. It’s the equivalent of spy hunter smokescreen.
The current US president* appears to want more coal to be burned and has denied climate change, as well as effected complete regulatory capture of the agency created to protect the environment.
Actually it's totally sensible and compatible with the actual actions of the various actors involved.
Companies continue to plunder the ecosystem in ways that knowingly damage it (fracking, rainforest depletion, etc), we have cheaper air fares than ever, every major company does only token moves while continuing the damages, and so on.
And of course for decades important agreements weren't signed because of financial interests...
E.g. people wanting plastic bags, even if they have to pay $0.20 for them, over the hassle of bringing their own hard bags to the supermarket?
Or people preferring more polluting ways to commute (e.g. car with one passenger over metro/bus) because of the convenience for them?
Though sometimes it can be both, or hard to tell.
They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If you understand science, from that sense, they’re definitely acting like tragic villains.
I wish it were so easy, that all environmentalists would need to do is admit they’ve overreached sometimes and been alarmist on the timeline etc, and people will see the reason in ideas like carbon taxes.
That’s not the experience I see out there. People are treating carbon taxes as the equivalent of communist invasion and an immoral affront to free society, rather than a conservative policy idea. (Similar to the healthcare debate)
I suppose there will always be people in the middle that could swing either way, they’re our main hope.
But I think it’s not helpful to scold “both sides” as you do above, equating over-eager environmentalists with those that want to accelerate our pollution and use of fossil fuels for short term gain. One is a misdemeanour, the other is quite literally contributing to global destabilization. Global warming in the next 75 years is leading to a wave of refugee immigration the world has never seen before (that a large segment of the populace also currently would reject and let starve). Germany has been poltically destabilized by 2 million Syrians. What happens when 1 billion or more are knocking on Europe and the US’s doors? I only wish I was overstating this for effect.
"Green New Deal" is a bunch of hysterics going nowhere fast, and the counter point are a bunch of idiots that think a snowstorm is proof global warming doesn't exist.
We've lost the boring middle ground solution that works, just like so many other areas of policy.
In other words, it absolutely is a money grab. That's the point!
Would it be better if that money went to useful programs? Absolutely! Same as the rest of our tax dollars.
Which is generally what Democrats don't want to do b/c its not raising taxes, and Republicans don't want to do b/c its not lowering taxes… but it'd sure go a long way to actually incentivizing heavy CO2 producers to change their ways that multilateral, international agreements have so far failed terribly at actually accomplishing anything about.
This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.
Climate change is not a problem, it is a phenomena which have consequences. Some of them we see today some are 100 years into the future.
We don't know what the right solution for the consequences in the future is as we don't even know what the consequences are and we don't even know what the problems are going to be.
We can speculate but we can be wrong and so its much better to solve the problems we have today in ways we know how to solve and then invest in R&D to develop better solutions than to chase a future that might or might not be here.
Alternatively I fear the current scenario were people have panicked and spend more time arguing on the internet than actually doing anything constructive about the problems right in front of them.
We’ve completely and utterly destroyed nature, seas are empty, air was unbreathsble at some point, all oyster banks completely gone, most wildlife going extinct and people are asking “what problem”?
Thank you for proving my point.
So the question still is what is the actual problem and how do you know it's correctly defined?
As I wrote in the top comment, I'm often surprised when reading articles which compare our current state with the past, the amount of life we've destroyed, the amount of pollution we're producing. So yes, subject to the same problem, but open to learning the facts...
You sound like the person that gets invited to a party, brings 100s of uninvited friends, completely trashes the house, kills a lot of the other invitees, and then is surprised when somebody thinks it's a problem:" you still have something resembling a roof, you can still sort of live here, what is the problem?"
I know the facts, thats why i am not concerned.
That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat, eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent famine in the face of climate degradation.)
The second option sounds somewhat enticing... but it would likely severely diminish speed of technological progress, hence diminish our even-longer-term changes of survival (think encounter and warfare with alien civs etc. - the universe is huge and if we/our-mostly-artificial-descendants survive long enough we'll have to compete with strains of life much more virulent than ourselves today).
Also, the kind of technological delay you're talking about there would be a couple of decades at most, when it looks like you're talking about thinking in terms of centuries. If anything, we're slowing down necessary technological advances to maintain the status quo long past the point where it's tenable.
"Climate change" is a red herring; we can "fix" the increasing temperature problem and yet deforestation, pollution, and overpopulation will still destroy every natural ecosystem on the planet.
The object of power is power and any claims of a cause are illusions and deceptions. React accordingly.
There are potential forms of alternative or third position government structures that allow for just as much or more personal freedom than current democracies, and yet can preserve our natural ecology. It just requires an accounting of destruction of commons, where untouched biodiversity is valued by the people of the state.
If we have the power to absolutely destroy the natural environment, we also have the power to protect its beauty for future generations rather than selfishly destroy the earth.
Plus that's kind of the opposite of what you're talking about, as most of the women are infertile.